Owen Jones was a British architect and designer whose travels to Granada in Spain in 1834 and 1837 produced a deep impact on his subsequent work. Those journeys are within the broader context of the discovery of Oriental cultures by the Romantics.
Romanticism emerged towards the late years of the eighteenth century and continued into the mid-19th century. The movement was a reaction against the austerity of classical forms in use up to that time. Writers and artists were looking for freedom of expression and originality.
The passion for everything related to the Oriental world emerged as a branch of Romanticism as it fitted into the non-classical ideal. Western authors and painters from countries such as Germany, France, England and the United States travelled to the East and discovered Islamic monuments and culture which deeply impressed them.
Spain and especially Andalucia, were notably appealing destinations for those artists, particularly for the British and Americans. It had been under Muslim rule for almost eight hundred years, from the eighth to the fifteenth century and so, the Islamic legacy in the country was still prevalent.
The city of Granada was the capital of the last Islamic kingdom of the Peninsula and its rulers, the Nasrid dynasty, had built their landmark fortress and palace complex over more than two centuries. The Alhambra comprises a series of palaces, mosques, gardens and baths that make up one of the most beautiful monuments of Spain. It evoked distant and exotic times in artists' minds and it became the protagonist of many paintings and drawings.
The effect it had upon Owen Jones was beyond mere fascination. While other artists altered its image to make it seem even more oriental and exotic, Jones praised it as the very summit of perfection of Moorish art, comparable to the Parthenon in Greek art. Even more, he considered the patterns he found in the Alhambra as the ultimate pattern designs, since they fulfilled each of the 'universal principles' of design.
This exhibition explores those principles Jones established with examples of two of his main books, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, published between 1842 and 1845 and The Grammar of Ornament, 1856, an essential handbook for generations of design students. In addition, you can see Jones' direct influence upon one of the most important pupils he had, Christopher Dresser, a leading designer of the nineteenth century.
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